Fierce Poise

December 15, 2020
An art historian assesses the career of one of the 20th century's great painters. A "child of the Upper East Side," youngest of three daughters of a New York State Supreme Court justice, and graduate of Bennington College, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was determined from a young age to become a painter. As a child, she would "dispense droplets of her mother's bloodred nail polish into the [sink] basin, watching the patterns spread before draining the water and studying the stains on the white porcelain." Inspired by Jackson Pollock, she developed a form of abstract painting whereby she thinned paint with turpentine and applied the mixture to an unprimed canvas. In this admiring, occasionally intimate biography, Nemerov focuses on "the formative decade of her life and career" by highlighting specific dates, one each from 1950 to 1960, as launching pads for a broader discussion of her work. The book has the misfortune to appear after Mary Gabriel's magnificent Ninth Street Women, which covered Frankenthaler and four other women artists in greater detail. This volume is considerably shorter and not as rich, and the sections only tangentially related to Frankenthaler's story--such as a passage on a friend's acting career--could have been excised. Nemerov is at his best in his analyses of Frankenthaler's paintings and artistic process; her romance with critic Clement Greenberg and his "insistent, demanding, pleading, hoping" behavior when she broke up with him; her marriage to abstract painter Robert Motherwell; and the backlash from some female detractors, including the ARTnews critic who wrote that Frankenthaler made "hysterical paintings" and called her a fraud. Nemerov is also cleareyed and evenhanded enough to note his subject's tendency to throw tantrums, as when she berated a furrier for delivering her new coat to the basement of the building next door rather than to her apartment. A fascinating but thin appreciation of a pioneering artist.

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January 1, 2021

In this biography of artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Nemerov (Stanford Univ. chair, art and art history; Soulmaker: The Times of Louis Hein) relies on interviews, correspondence, newspapers, archives, diaries, monographs, and exhibition catalogs to provide insight into her formative years. Nemerov's purpose is to help today's viewers overcome their skepticism of romantic art such as Frankenthaler's and understand her style of painting. His choice of format, with each chapter using one day to represent a year within the 1950s, is based on her paintings' fluidity and spontaneity. In spring 1950, Frankenthaler started dating well-known art critic Clement Greenberg, who introduced her to established artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, smoothing her way into the art world. Inspired by Pollock, she started with unprimed, unstretched canvas on the floor, painting with turpentine-thinned colors, after drawing with charcoal. Nemerov convincingly depicts Frankenthaler's artistic milieu. This review is from a prepublication PDF; image and binding quality are unknown. The book contains an index, image credits, and chapter endnotes, but no bibliography. VERDICT While some may disagree with the author's assumption about audience appreciation of Frankenthaler's oeuvre, this book will appeal to those interested in the developmental years of a 1950s artist, and her creative process.--Nancy J. Mactague, formerly Aurora Univ. Lib., IL

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2021
Art historian Nemerov chose not to write a full biography of abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, a student of his father's at Bennington College, but rather to follow her footsteps as she created her uniquely fluid, liberated, personal, and animated visual language and techniques and attained prominence in her twenties. A New Yorker born to stature and wealth if not sustained familial happiness, Frankenthaler didn't struggle financially as most of her peers did in New York during the 1950s. And her privilege, "fierce poise," and ambition stoked resentment among her fellow artists, amplified by her relationship with influential critic Clement Greenberg, followed by her marriage to established painter Robert Motherwell. But Nemerov reveals the depression and painful predicaments behind Frankenthaler's glossy, confident exterior. Pairing vivid anecdotal biography with energetic descriptive analysis, the author recalibrates our perception of Frankenthaler's undulating and entrancing canvases, on which she channeled in-the-moment feelings and celebrated the "beauty and power and glory" of life. With reverence and irreverent wit, nimble narration, pertinent art history, and a vibrant cast of characters, Nemerov chronicles the first round in Frankenthaler's extraordinary artistic adventure.

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